The Sixties
Page 5
Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.
It was also emotionally utopian. Free from the complexities of possessive responses trained by the rigid, repressive social apparatus that caused the Fifties generation to moulder, as we saw it, in sexual frustration. All done up in tight-waisted, hobble-skirted, corseted clothing and manners.
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the woman is not ‘giving.’ No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
The reality of the zipless fuck was as far removed from romance as it was possible to get. That was the point:
For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well.... So another condition for the zipless fuck was brevity. And anonymity made it even better.
Of course, the zipless fuck absolutely required the pill, without which fumbling and anxiety, no matter how advanced the mind might be, was unavoidable. It was invented in 1961, but was available only to married women or those brave enough to get a cheap ring from Woolworths and brazen it out in grim family planning clinics. Between 1962 and 1969, the number of users in the UK rose from approximately 50,000 to one million. It helped not to have to rely on men to use condoms properly or withdraw at the right moment, or have to remember to put in the diaphragm before, but not too long before, it was likely you were going to have sex. It was a great advance for women in general, worldwide, even for the cause of sexual liberation. But the fact that Isadora was still looking for this unencumbered encounter in 1973, and that women found Fear of Flying a compelling read, tells us a lot about the difficulty of achieving the sexual revolution we had been trying so hard for. The post-war generation was brought up by parents who aimed for respectability, and to conceal any suggestion that the body was not under the strict control of the civilised mind. The great weapons were shame and embarrassment. It was not only difficult to find yourself unmarried and pregnant (bringing up children is at any period a very tough one-person activity), it was a disgrace. Hiding the fact was far more important than dealing with it. Our parents, a generation that had responded to the uncertainty of war with a good deal of sexual licence (the writer John Mortimer remembered VE Day, when the grassy expanses of Hyde Park heaved with copulating couples), and during the bombings and enforced separations snatched physical pleasure in the face of absence and death, now scurried back to the social straight and narrow and impressed on its children the need to conform. Working-class or middle-class, respectability, in the sense of not doing anything the neighbours didn’t want you to think they did, was a very high priority.
The sexual revolution is certainly an idea people have about the Sixties. It was also an idea that the Sixties had about itself even though there was, as Henry Miller said, nothing new about small groups of usually affluent or arty people having complicated, delightful and miserable sex with each other. Screwing, joyfully or grimly or even obediently, like rabbits, as if there were no tomorrow. Sex is presumably always a brand new discovery to every generation. A secret they had better not tell their parents about, in case, God forbid, they take it up. In some periods this has happened in spite of the parents doing their damnedest to keep it a secret not just from their children but also from themselves. The Fifties was not an optimum time for sexual openness. Books that had any bearing on the subject were banned or not published without much challenge. It was very hard to get any information about the body. Ignorance and received morality were believed to stroll hand in hand, just like back before we were cast out of the garden. This time it was back gardens and yards with fences just the right height to gossip over. In any case, in the Fifties, England was not conducive in a practical way to bodily delight. Houses were cold and damp, with no central heating. Bathrooms were grim, icy affairs of chilled, cracking lino and uncertain waterheaters that gave up their hot water, after a good deal of clanking and groaning, in a thin stream that was inclined to run cold when the money in the gas meter ran out long before the bath was more than a puddle. The spa experience was a long way off. The sensual pleasures of steaming scented wet-rooms where bodies were (worth it, worth it) deservedly pampered, muscles relaxed, skin moisturised in preparation for a night of love of self or other, alone or in company, was too remotely in the future even to daydream about in the draughty washrooms of 1957. When you’d brushed your teeth and washed your face, you stripped off your clothes and pulled on your nightdress or pyjamas and dived into bed as quickly as you possibly could. Hot water bottle. Eiderdown. Being naked just meant being cold well into the mid-Sixties. Hard to tell if people made love under the covers out of primness or protection against the frost.
Language was the equivalent of the icy bathroom. The euphemism ruled. As if ‘period’ was not evasive enough, my mother described her monthly bleeding, and eventually mine, as ‘being unwell’. It was not at all surprising to have to spend several days a month on a sofa, suffering, though why, and from what exactly, remained a mystery to me until I was twelve. She warned me when I was eleven that when I ‘became a woman’ she might have to slap my face because of the shock I would receive one day in the bathroom. Blood wasn’t mentioned. The worst thing I and my classmates could imagine was someone – a boy especially, but even another girl, oh, anyone – seeing a sanitary towel hidden in our schoolbag. And the terror of ‘coming on’ and finding you had been walking around with a spot of blood on the back of your skirt... The shame was that people would know you were doing what every woman does once a month for a third of her life – bleeding.
At thirteen I came across an item in a home medical encyclopedia about ‘self-abuse’. Though it suggested quite liberally that there was nothing dangerous about it, the name itself, and the fact that it had an entry, made it clear that it was a medical problem. It described ‘touching the private parts’, and I realised that I did that every night, drifting off to sleep, curled up in bed with my hand between my legs, holding my vulva. I had not the slightest notion of orgasm, nor did the article talk about the purpose of the touching, only that it was nothing to worry about, though it was a good idea to talk about it to a doctor if you did it regularly. I had my first sexual terror. Later, I would be regularly consumed with worry that I might be pregnant or have a venereal disease, but this was my first sexual bodily alarm (as it happened I didn’t faint with fright on getting my period, though I wondered, when I told my mother, whether I shouldn’t slap her shocked face). I was consumed by uncertainty, that cloud of sexual unknowing that hovered over our heads, fearing something was wrong with me, though I couldn’t work out from the encyclopedia what exactly it was and what the consequences would be. Being fearful, vaguely guilty and feeling alone was what burgeoning sexuality meant to large numbers of people in the late Fifties and early Sixties.
In America the Beats, along with Humbert and his nymphet, were shocking readers and still getting banned for sexual explicitness, but in England we fell on Lady Chatterley in 1961, when it was finally published in an accessible paperback edition after a notorious court case (‘Would you want your wives and servants reading this book?’ the prosecuting counsel asked the jury). We were searching for information, though we got very little. Sexuality was there in the pages of books, but diffuse, metaphorised out of existence. Metaphor is little better than euphemism to information-hungry adolescents. Somerset Maugham and Neville Shute wrote what were thought to be steamy novels, but they were steamy in the same way that a bathroom mirror is steamy – you fail to see what you are looking at. I read them all hopefully, but only found my misty surmises effloresced into jungles of confusion. Y
es, wellings and rushings and pumpings, and never-before-experienced experiences, but what had actually happened, what did they do and how? It was only when social class became a serious subject in novels, plays and films that sexual and many other silences were released into the wild. Room at the Top came out in 1957, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1960, A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room in 1961 and ’62. They began to clear the mist away, and linked a vivid sexuality to youth, education and social anger, though mostly for men. The women still longed, loved and feared that they’d get knocked up, and weren’t so much sexually vivid as socially timorous or occasionally brave.
However, by the late Sixties, although we may not have done recreational drugs, we did do casual sex. We tried hard to make sex as casual as sleeping. There were, of course, couples. Two individuals bound together for longer or shorter periods, madly in love, or loving friends, or one of them having their heart broken by an unfaithful other, being betrayed or betraying in the old-fashioned way that casual sex didn’t permit. But they were anomalies, we supposed, or were discovered to be people who had minded all along about things that we were supposed to have stopped caring about. People had sex because they and it were there, like climbing mountains but with less effort and preparation required, and, as we thought then, danger-free. It was late, someone would stay over or not go back to their own room. You might even really fancy someone, suddenly, or you’d think: why not? There never seemed to be a legitimate answer to that. It was on the one hand part of the vital and present task of experiencing experience, and on the other a contemporary version of good manners. Sex was a way of being polite to those who suggested it or who got into your bed. It was very difficult not to fuck someone who wanted to fuck you without feeling you were being very rude. My guess, no, my certainty, is that large numbers of people slept with friends, acquaintances and strangers that they had no desire for. I also guess that this was more desultory for women, few of whom, I regret to say, seemed as jaunty the following day as the men who waved them a cheery farewell. Part of the newness of the world we were creating was the abolition of jealousy, and the idea of possessing other people. The ‘that’s your problem’ catch-all for complaints applied to sexual relations, too. You took responsibility for yourself and this meant not making demands on others whose wishes were different from your own. Clearly, this was not an equally balanced provision. Wanting overrode not wanting. To stop someone having something they wanted was to be a drag, really controlling, just laying ‘your problem’ on others who were unburdened by your hang-ups. But I do recall a few gentle souls who wandered into my room and asked tentatively, ‘Want a fuck?’ and then wandered out again without stopping to debate my problem if I replied with a sleepy, ‘No, thanks.’
But there was a large principle at state. If sex was no longer going to be a taboo then it was hard to think of a good reason not to have it with anyone who came along. It was uncool to say no. It was easier to say yes than to explain. It was difficult to come up with a justification for refusing to have sex with someone that didn’t seem selfish. The idea that rape was having sex with someone who didn’t want to do it didn’t apply very much in the late Sixties. On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn’t take no for an answer. But not wanting wasn’t the main thing. It doesn’t sound so exciting, this sexual revolution, does it? Mostly it wasn’t. Open relationships were frequently tried, but I never came across any where at least one of the pair was not suffering and eventually unable to suppress it. There was a commune set up near my place which a friend of mine stayed in when he needed somewhere to live. The rules of the commune were that you weren’t allowed to sleep with the same person for more than three nights in a row, so that no couples developed. Sex was free, relationships were forbidden. In order for the non-possessive rule to work, everyone there had to be prepared to sleep with everyone else – though I believe that men were exempted from having to have sex with men if they didn’t want to. My friend found it very tiring packing up his bag and moving on to the next room every few days, and turned up at my flat from time to time to get a few regular nights’ sleep.
In order to fight against the arbitrary moral codes the bourgeois world imposed on the young, the young imposed on themselves arbitrary physical requirements that took very little account of the complexity of human emotional connections. We cut a swathe through the conventions, but invented new conventions that gave us just as much heartache. Liberation, at least in its sexual form, was a new form of imposed morality, quite as restricting and causing at least as much repression as we accused our parents’ generation of creating. Our elders called it permissiveness, but the permission we gave ourselves was more like a set of orders for disobeying our elders.
The journalist John Lloyd describes his experience of a commune, which sounds remarkably similar to the very one my friend had occasionally to escape from.
In our flat, which we ran as a commune, the whole sex thing was extremely earnest. There was a lot of promiscuity, everybody had to swap partners. We didn’t get into homosexuality, it was all heterosexuality. I’m not sure whether we really did elevate it above wife-swapping. It was quite exploitative of male and female. It was a lot of men liking to fuck a lot and saying to women, ‘Why won’t you fuck me?’ I remember saying that quite a lot. And some women who were strong and sensible enough said, ‘Because I don’t want to,’ but quite often it was ‘Well... all right...’ Contraception was generally available, and there was an ethos of doing it, and it was good and it was liberating and it was an act of friendship or love. But we weren’t really liberated – all of us had a lot of hang-ups. We had been brought up traditionally, even strictly, and to try to leap out of your own habits and upbringing into this blissful state where there were not hang-ups was of course interesting psychologically, but it was completely impossible. And all the jealousies and tensions just grew exponentially.5
Another version is Richard Neville’s afterthought:
Part of battling against a joyless morality – don’t fuck until you get married, and when you do you’ll both be so dreadful you’ll probably get divorced. I had come from a very bad marriage and I was interested in men and women working out a different sort of sexual/social behaviour. But of course there is some truth in the idea that this was institutionalising getting laid, providing a political framework for sex. I loved women and I loved making love to them. I loved fucking and there were lots of people around who felt the same. I don’t think that anyone was pushed into bed by me. A lot of girls climbed through my window.6
Communes weren’t a brand new idea, but we could hardly avoid investigating them. The nuclear family model was beginning to look very limited. So we set up communes or lived communally in our flats, sharing the washing-up and each other’s lovers, and then discovered what that meant in the actual day-to-day living. Usually a terrible mess and a lot of anger – regarding both the washing-up and the sex. The communal dream invariably ended in acrimony as all the tensions of the old way of living pulled the group idea apart. Children, love, money, work, privacy and ownership were all ancient and crucial issues that for the most part we failed successfully to negotiate. To tell each other that other cultures lived in this way didn’t take into account our lack of experience in living in any way at all. All the time, in every aspect of our lives, the thing we forgot, and the thing that enabled us to do what we did, was the fact of our being young.
And once again, as with the funding for our radical ways of life, it wasn’t the young really who were in charge of enabling this sexual revolution that our elders and ourselves talked so much about. The pill, the great enabler of fearless sex (for a short while) was developed by that older generation. And the easing of sexual repression in the UK began, if it had a beginning, in the heart of everything we most despised: government. Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary of the Labour government between 1965 and 1967. Born in 1920, he was not part of the Sixties generation bu
t an upper-middle-class liberal with no time for Victorian morality. In 1959 he wrote a pamphlet called Is Britain Civilised?
The need is to campaign for a general climate of opinion favourable to gaiety and tolerance, and opposed to puritanical restriction and a drab, ugly pattern of life. It is not really a job for politicians, of course, although they, like any other leaders of opinion, can do something to set the tone...But the important thing is to encourage them all, and to recognise that one form of intolerance breeds another and one type of drabness makes another more likely. Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side too of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. In the long run these things will be more important than even the most perfect of economic policies.7